Are you a male fish? Want to impress a mate? Position yourself upstream and …

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Impressing your mate through urination: No, it's not a matter of nerves. Pheromones are a big deal when it comes to mating in the animal world, although the debate continues about their relevance to human pairings. It's not a surprise to see a paper entitled "Tactical Release of a Sexually-Selected Pheromone in a Swordtail Fish," but the amusing bit is the method used to track the release: the researchers injected fluorescent dyes in the male fishes' abdomens, then put them in a tank with or without females. "Males urinated more frequently in the presence and proximity of an audience," they found.

The authors note that, in the wild, males approached potential mates from the upstream direction. Apparently, urination is a way of ensuring that they get the hint. Note: this probably doesn't work in public pools.

A touch of aggression: A bit more about pheromones in the water. Female squid leave their eggs on the open sea floor and wait for males to spot them. Should the males get close enough to touch them, however, the females have a bit of a surprise in store: a pheromone they deposit on the egg case completely rewires the male squid's behavior, turning it from a calm, schooling animal to one that will attack any other males in sight—even if there's no female around. Incidentally, we mammals have genes for proteins that are related to the squid pheromone.

The challenge of dinosaur sex probably didn't lead to their extinction: This is more an overview of the state of the field's knowledge, but it's a good read nevertheless. Smithsonian.com is running an article on "Everything You Wanted to Know About Dinosaur Sex" by the always-excellent Brian Switek. Ever contemplated how a stegosaurus managed to maneuver around all those plates and spikes? Here's your chance to find out.

Depends on your definition of "saw": Another good look at cultural biases, brought to us by the same people who showed us how the public can dismiss scientific expertise if it goes against their political tendencies. This time, they looked at a legal issue: whether a group of protesters were obstructing and threatening pedestrians. The trick was that they showed a single film of a protest, but told their subjects the protests were either about abortion or military recruiting. People's political biases had a strong effect on how they interpreted the protest's legal standing.

It really is getting worse: There's a lot of talk about how political discourse in the US has descended into the gutter and is looking for ways to sink further. But now, a couple of researchers have attempted to quantify its fall, tracing the use of what they term "outrage discourse." That's defined as "efforts to provoke a visceral response from the audience, usually in the form of anger, fear, or moral righteousness through the use of overgeneralizations, sensationalism, misleading or patently inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks, and partial truths about opponents." Their conclusion: everybody's doing it, but conservative outlets are doing more of it.

The most compelling result to me, however, was the long-term analysis, in which the researchers followed syndicated columnists who have been writing through tumultuous times such as the Vietnam War and Watergate. Despite the high stakes, the columnists kept their cool back then, but had lost it by 2009 when, pretty obviously, the level of crisis was much lower.

At least they didn't try snorting the snakes: This is a rare alternative form of substance abuse that I was not previously aware of: intentional snake bites. These can have mind-altering effects, but there's a downside: they can also kill you. (Which may explain why the two reported cases in the literature involved substance abusers who couldn't get their usual hits.)

We're happy to report that access to venomous snakes in India has allowed some psychiatrists there to identify two more cases. "We report a series of two patients with multiple substance use disorders who resorted to occasional snake bites for recreational purposes," the authors state, indicating that these cases didn't use the snake bites as a substitute for their normal highs, but in order to try something new. (Found via Mind Hacks.)